Before Macy’s put its red star atop downtown Seattle’s Bon Marche’ flagship store, just a crosswalk from Westlake Center, the building was so large it could boast something of inordinate magnitude — its own zip code.
Now a visionary, new team of entrepreneurs and educators that goes by the name of Galavanize, is taking over something writ as large as another “city block” with an occupancy of 71,000 square feet inside the five-story building in Seahawk country at 111 S. Jackson St.
The Denver-based Galvanize says it is focused on coalescing communities of early stage technology companies through the three pillars of Community, Curriculum and Capital. The Curriculum tri-tip is delivered through what Galavanize calls a gSchool, a school for coders, or what Galavanzine describes as an “immersive developer training program.” The enterprise will also offer gSchool Workshops.
For example, there is the 24-week, full-time “Full Stack Web Development Immersion” currently being offered at other Galvanize campuses in Boulder, San Francisco, Denver and Fort Collins. If you set your mind to it, over the course of the 24-weeks, Galavanize will teach you how to build and maintain a series of web applications using modern technologies (Ruby on Rails and Javascript) and industry best practices. The program is twice as long as the typical coding school because, says the syllabus, “We do more than just teach how to write code: we teach you how to be a contributing member of a development team. Galvanize U. is the name given to a 12-month, full-time immersive graduate program needed to be a successful Data Scientist. Interestingly, the current website at galvanize.it is built using Squarespace.
Galavanize plans for gSchool Scholarships to be made available. “At gSchool, we are dedicated to the mission of de-homogenizing the tech industry and providing more opportunities to change lives for more people from more backgrounds. For each of our Full Stack courses, we will offer partial scholarships worth up to $5000 to women, veterans and under-represented people in the tech industry,” the company announced.
Galvanize is also looking for Mentors to join its community.
With a footprint as large as a zip-code area in downtown Seattle, the commitment seems broad-based. It will be interesting to see how Galavanize will co-habitate with other regional incubators including Techstars, the UW, Madrona Venture Labs, and Microsoft’s BizSpark, to name a few.
The Galavanize complex is scheduled to open in May. [24×7]
